Nine suspects have been detained in Yancheng, East China’s Jiangsu Province for smuggling sugar over the weekend after border police there noticed that the Chinese characters on the prow of the cargo ship, which was loaded with tons of sugar, were printed in a reverse order, news website 163.com reported on Tuesday [5 September 2017…Full Article: ECNS.cn Sept 2017

Key Point

Law enforcement officials in Yancheng, Jiangsu Province, seized 1,300 MTs (~25,000 bags) of Thai-produced sugar on a shipping vessel. The majority of the ship’s crew were from Indonesia.

ChinaAg Comments

Sugar smuggling into China continues to thrive thanks to the country’s annual sugar supply gap of approximately 2 million metric tons (MTs). It is estimated that China’s annual sugar consumption totals 16 million MTs, while production and imports typically reach only 14 million MTs. In 2016, China’s sugar production totaled roughly 9.5 million MTs while imports of raw and refined sugar reached 3.3 million MTs. As a consequence of the annual sugar shortfall, at least 1 million MTs of sugar illegally crosses the border into China from Southeast Asia on a yearly basis. Myanmar is arguably the largest illicit supplier.

In August 2016, law enforcement officials in Anhui Province seized 1,200 MTs of illicit sugar that was smuggled in by gangs based in Yunnan Province and Myanmar.

From 2011 to 2016, Thailand produced roughly 10 million MTs to 11 million MTs of sugar annually, making it the fourth largest sugar producer (after Brazil, India, and the EU) in the world.